Adele took a deep breath, then stepped over the bench. “I’m not leaving,” she said, noticing the sudden misery on the faces of the gathered officers. “I just needed to get on the other side of this damned barricade.”
She tapped the bench with her toe. She’d knocked over the wineglass, all right, and soaked the cuff of the one civilian suit she’d brought with her aboard the Princess Cecile. Not a matter of great moment, she supposed, but typical of other things.
“Forgive me for my discourtesy,” Adele continued. Her reaction could have been worse: she hadn’t drawn her pistol. “I understand your concern, but to the best of my knowledge—”
Which was very good knowledge indeed.
“—neither the government of Cinnabar nor the RCN more specifically have any active concern with the Aristoxenos and her crew. That’s far in the past. You can live your lives in as great an assurance of safety as—”
She smiled with the bleak humor that seasoned the dark parts of her life. Not long ago those parts had been almost all of her life.
“—any of us have in this existence.”
“We thought . . . ,” said Admiral O’Quinn, holding his big mug in both hands and staring into its empty depths. “That since you were . . . ?”
He looked up without finishing the sentence.
“Yes,” said Adele crisply. “But that was coincidence. My stopover is merely because Todos Santos is a nexus for routes into the North, which my foreign employers wish to explore.”
She smiled again with her usual quirky humor.
“Much the same reasons that brought you here in times past, I suppose,” she added.
“But the captain of your ship is Speaker Leary’s son!” said Estaing, who’d been—who probably still was—the battleship’s Fourth Lieutenant. “If you’re not the emissary, mistress, is he?”
“Mr. Estaing . . . ,” Adele said in a cold voice. Estaing was a tall man, rangy and handsome in file imagery. He hadn’t run as far to fat as some of the others, but he had the eyes of a ferret and a facial twitch as regular as a metronome. “I said you’re safe. No one is searching for you. Not me, not Captain Leary, and not even the three women to whom you apparently promised marriage in the days leading up to the discovery of the Three Circles Conspiracy!”
That was probably more than a former RCN warrant officer, now on the beach, should have known about a man she’d never met. Still, she’d said it and had no real regrets. She’d read the files on the Aristoxenos’ officers, not because she’d expected to meet them but because she was Adele Mundy and she liked to know things. Politics aside, Lieutenant Estaing was a pig.
Nobody spoke for a moment; Estaing flushed and turned away.
“Adele,” said Adrian. “Please—I think you’re misunderstanding. We aren’t afraid of the Senate hunting us down. We thought, you see, just possibly . . . that Cinnabar was offering to let us return.”
Oh good God, Adele thought, not for the first time in this interview. She had to struggle to restrain a laugh, instinctive protection against the horror of the situation that she’d just uncovered.
“Adrian,” she said aloud, speaking as carefully as she’d have chosen her footing across a muddy field. “I can’t speak to that, and I assure you Captain Leary has no knowledge of the subject either. He’s estranged from his father, and he was never interested in politics anyway.”
“But they allowed you back?” Adrian said. “And we thought . . . ?”
“The Edict of Reconciliation was issued over a decade ago,” Adele said, speaking sharply so that her words wouldn’t be mistaken for agreement. “I had occasion to read it carefully, as you might imagine. The Edict specifically excepts certain categories of people, in particular mutinous members of the RCN and the Land Forces of the Republic who failed to accept the terms of the amnesty within six months of the offer.”
“I told you!” said Tetrey, the Sixth Lieutenant; a petite woman in old pictures, a mass of pasty flesh in present reality. “I told you there was no way they’d take us back, but you had to go ahead with this charade!”